THE RECONDITE REVOLUTION: WAR, THE “MODIFIED” STATE OF NATURE, HUMAN MORALITY, AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT THEORY

War, ab initio, has always been conceived of as one of the worst crimes against human nature and life; with approximately 14,500 military conflicts having been conducted throughout the history of the world and around 3.5 billion human lives that have been lost to the annals of time during the fightings of such campaigns (if one thinks about it, this is the equivalent of killing off almost two-thirds of the current world population), it is hard not to feel like war is the most amoral act on the face of the earth (Mingst 207-208). It is thus quite ironic that Heraclitus, two millennia ago, should have claimed that “War is the father of all”; but this adage has sense to its madness. In the view of an American pastor and early abolitionist, Anthony Benezet, for example, in a sermon of “thanksgiving for the successes obtained in the late war” (i.e. the Seven Years’ War), he describes war as being a malignant practice, something antithetical to true Christian doctrine and faith, pointing to Christ’s order to love “thy FELLOW CREATURE as thyself” , and later refers to it as the thing which devours “this unhappy circle, which is, indeed, the great circle of the history of man….